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Sympathy for the Spreadsheet Guy

Is it wrong that I get where he’s coming from? If you have no idea what I’m talking about, on Tuesday Jezebel published a thing about this banker who kept a spreadsheet of all of his dates, with super detailed notes about the women and color coding and process notes and everything. The Post covered it today, calling him a creep, which is rich coming from a paper that regularly publishes identifying information about rape victims but hey, priorities.

Some are tagged “Monitor Closely (bold = ASAP),” like the girl who was “Very pretty; sweet & down to earth/great personality; hope to see again soon” and others, such as a girl with a “nice face and bod” but “very jappy; one and done for me,” are under “monitor casually.”

“I work with spreadsheets a lot,” he told us. “It’s a great additional tool. I work long days, go to the gym, go out on a couple of midweek dates or what not, get home late…how am I going to remember them? I’m not. So I made the spreadsheets. My comments aren’t malicious or mean. This was an honest attempt to stay organized.”

Which is embarrassing, I agree. But calling him a creep is going a bit far. I mean, it’s not like he’s one of those guys that keeps lists of exploitable things about women, or some kind of bedpost notch conquest list or anything. People have commented that if he was really paying attention to the women he was with, he wouldn’t need an excel document, but that makes me wonder if those people have ever actually done online dating. The whole point is to go on a gazillion dates in the hopes of finding one (or several) that you really like. Is anybody really that good at remembering details about the lives of a bunch of people you’ve only interacted with once or twice?

I don’t know. Maybe it’s just because I’m the kind of person whose google docs is filled with incredibly detailed lists of action steps and recipe-related spreadsheets, but I feel for this guy. Only an idiot sends his dating spreadsheet to a person that he just met and thinks she’s going to find it charming, but that hardly seems like grounds for being called a creep by the Post.